Whatever. I’m still more comfortable sitting out here at one of the small, black metal tables with the uncomfortable black wrought iron chairs than sitting inside where people can hear us talk about stuff.
Cursed stuff.
There isn’t anyone out here for obvious reasons.
Kirian lets out a huff when he sits down. He takes a sip of his coffee and makes a face I can’t decipher. I want to tell him that if he had asked me, I would have informed him ahead of time that all coffee tastes like shit. That way, he could have saved his five bucks, but I keep it to myself and instead get down to business hoovering up the sticky toffee pudding before it can become seasoned with road dust.
“Love the atmosphere of the place,” I garble out with my mouth half full.
Kirian obviously isn’t going to be put off by my snarky attitude and bad table manners. He takes out the necklace. “Touch it,” he says.
“I’m not touching it! Do you know how perverted that sounds?”
“Touch it. To see if it glows.” He rolls his eyes. “This is important. I thought only I could make the necklace glow because no one who has ever come into contact with it has been able to do it. I’ve tried it with all my cousins, with friends, getting people to clean it, and even getting appraisals done on it, just to see if anyone there could make it glow. I’ve had a lot of people come into contact with it, but no one has succeeded.”
Creepy. This is getting worse by the second, and now my sticky toffee pudding tastes like road dust without even having that much road dust on it. Fuckityfuck. It takes a lot to ruin good sticky toffee pudding, and this one is up to par with the usual rich, buttery, and slightly spicy goodness.
“I’m not touching it. Not until you tell me about the curse.”
Kirian glances up and down the sidewalk, but no one is close enough to hear. “My granny cursed it,” he whisper-yells.
My heart just about stops. “What? The granny who paid me to steal it from you?”
“The very same.”
I feel like I’m choking on caramel sauce. I push my plate away and drop my fork down hard. It’s plastic, so it doesn’t make a sound when it falls, but it does spray a shower of pudding all over Kirian. I expect him to leap up and dab his shirt, but he acts like it didn’t even happen. I guess I have to give him points for not freaking out about having a stain on his expensive shirt.
“Why…why would she curse it and then ask me to steal it? Is this some kind of a joke? Or…or payback for…”
“For what?” Kirian stares at me, intrigued, but then he puts me out of my misery. “It’s not payback for anything. The curse is…you don’t even want to know. Anyway, my granny didn’t curse it herself. I said it wrong. She got it cursed. I don’t know by whom, but the curse has already affected my brother and one of my cousins. There are five of us, and we each got an heirloom.”
“That sounds horrifying.” I suddenly feel like the sticky toffee pudding I managed to eat is crawling back up my throat. I grab my scalding hot tea and gulp it down to try and wash the dessert back into my stomach. I also hope the spices from the tea helps to settle all that’s spinning down.
“Oh, it’s not.”
Now I’m the one giving Kirian a look of disbelief. No, it’s probably close to a look that asks him if he’s straight-up butt crazy as opposed to regular crazy. Butt crazy really takes things up a level. Like to the level of finding out you might be cursed by a granny’s curse, which has claimed two other people so far.
“No, it’s not bad,” Kirian is saying, but I’m only half listening because I’m trying hard not to start hyperventilating. “I mean, not in a bad way. It might…I mean, it’s not life-threatening or anything.”
I’m all out of patience, and I’m freaking out. I might have almost a hundred grand in my bank account from said granny, but is being cursed worth it? This is seriously uncool. And now my sticky toffee pudding is wasted because I can’t eat another bite, and I hate wasting food. Call it a product of never having enough when I was little. If something like this materialized when I was younger, I would have thought I’d died and gone to dessert heaven. I would have eaten every single bite of the pudding, even if it was covered in road dust and it fell on the road and was run over several times. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not.